The two most important questions you can ask yourself when pitching to investors

Today I was asked a simple question at the end of a fundraising webinar with Eagle Labs: what's the most common mistake founders make when preparing to fundraise?

Award-winning corporate financier Neil Wood's answer was not knowing your numbers. More precisely, not knowing what share of your serviceable addressable market you can realistically win. Get that wrong, he said, and it throws off every figure that follows, right through to exit.

My answer was simpler: putting features before benefits.

It's the mistake I see more than any other. And, as it happens, I'd watched it play out that very morning.

"This is cool. But why would anyone buy it?"

I'd spent 90 minutes with a brilliant deep-tech founder going through their investor deck. The tech was seriously impressive.

The opening slide described the product as a "design engine for early conceptualisation".

My response? So what?

It was clever. But it told me what the thing was, not why I should care. I came out of the session thinking: this is cool, and I have no idea why anyone would want to buy it.

Here's the trap. Founders are experts. The "so what" lives in their head and their heart, so they assume everyone else can see it too. They can't. Nobody cares about your thing as much as you do. They don't care until you make them care.

Why do benefits beat features?

Marketers and psychologists have been making this point for decades.

• Harvard Business School's Theodore Levitt popularised the line that people don't want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole. Customers buy outcomes, not tools.
• Neil Rackham's research behind SPIN Selling studied more than 35,000 sales calls. In big-ticket sales, talking up features and advantages did little to win deals. Showing how you meet a buyer's real, stated need did.
• Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio found that people with damage to the brain areas that process emotion struggle to make even simple decisions. Emotion isn't the enemy of a rational choice. It's part of how we make one.
• DocSend's analysis of investor behaviour found investors spent less than four minutes, on average, looking at a pitch deck. You don't have time to make them work out the benefit for themselves.

And in an age when anyone can vibe-code anything, investors are drowning in decks. Grab them by the collar early, or lose them.

How do you turn a feature into a benefit? Ask "so what?", then ask it again

Here's the simplest tool I know for turning a feature into a benefit. Take any claim on any slide and ask: so what? Answer it. Then ask so what again.

The first "so what" usually gets you to the practical problem. The second gets you to the human one: the thing people feel, fear and pay to fix.

Here's roughly how it went with that founder:

• The feature: A dedicated tool for early-stage ship concept design.
• So what? Right now, that work is done in spreadsheets and stitched together across a pile of expensive, disconnected specialist tools.
• So what? It's slow, costly and stressful. One mistake at bid stage can lose a contract worth millions and damage a firm's reputation.

Now we're talking. That second answer is the one an investor can feel. Features explain what you've built. Benefits explain why it matters.

For investors, go one step further. What matters to your customers drives adoption and revenue. That's what matters to your investor. The real pitch wasn't "we've built a clever engine". It was "we've found a way to change how an entire industry works". That's the moment an investor's money starts paying attention.

How do you put it to work on your deck?

1. Go slide by slide. For every claim, ask "so what?" twice. If you can't answer, rewrite the slide or cut it.
2. Lead with the benefit. Features come second, as proof you can deliver.
3. Explain it to a 12-year-old. If the benefit needs jargon to make sense, it isn't clear enough yet.
4. Get specific. "Huge problem" means nothing. How big is huge? A mountain is huge. So is a swimming pool. Give the cost, the time, the risk.

Most decks don't need tearing up. They need a "so what" running all the way through them.

Watch the webinar

I covered this and more with Neil Wood of Wood Associates in Fundraising season is open: what investors are looking for right now, hosted by Eagle Labs: who the right investors are, what they care about (especially with AI), and the mistakes that kill deals.

Two questions. Ask them every time.

So what? And so what again?

They're the two most important questions you can ask yourself before you pitch. Because investors don't care until you make them care.

Benefits first. Features second. Always.

Want a second pair of eyes on your deck? Get in touch with SmplCo.